The Worrying Psychology of America's Two-Party System

If there’s one thing Americans from across the political spectrum can agree on, it’s that the two-party system isn’t doing this country any favors. In fact, this persistent “Us and Them” mentality has been strangling the public of its rationality since the late 16th century.

Our Founding Fathers were the first to warn us that a two-party system was not in the country’s best interests. John Adams said in a letter he penned in 1780, “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader... This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” Adams was referring not to the U.S. Constitution, which would not be written until 1787, but to the ideologies and principles that ought to embody us as a nation and people. A nation with its head at war with its ankles would always sacrifice the health and harmony of its middle, and sitting hunched over all day is no good for a man’s back.

And yet, we’ve reached a point where for every issue plaguing the American people, their legislators proclaim only two possible solutions- that of the right, and that of the left.

There is another arena in which such “this-or-that” mentality is routinely utilized, and that’s wartime propaganda. Throughout history and across most countries’ histories, domestic propaganda has been used to dehumanize the opposing side. How can a teenager bring himself to murder a peer with many of the same wants, needs, and aspirations? He couldn’t if he saw that peer as anything but the personification of evil.

Americans saw this immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. As young men signed up to lay their lives on the line for revenge on the Japanese, and Japanese Americans were being rounded up and sent to internment camps, posters lined city blocks comparing the Japanese to rodents and monkey-like savages. A series of such propaganda portrayed Japanese men assaulting and threatening young white women. Each sign read, “This is the Enemy.”

Today, we see this tactic used frequently in American politics. Rush Limbaugh somewhat infamously compared Obama to Hitler. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Maureen Dowd equalized Tea Party Republicans with suicide bombers. Pulpits from either side shout down the beliefs of their foes with vehement disregard. They refuse to acknowledge an iota of merit in their adversaries’ arguments.

But the advent of political rivals as emotional adversaries is, to a large extent, biological in nature. Research suggests that in-group favoritism has been a characteristic of humans and our immediate ancestors for millions of years. As mankind evolved, sharing resources and trust with family members and neighbors above other groups was advantageous. A more thriving community would be self-serving for each of its individual members, and the survival of one’s family members would ensure the survival of one’s own genetics by proxy. But in American politics, in-group favoritism results in the blind belief that the political party to which an individual contends membership can do no wrong. It means that if Allen is a Democrat, any action he deems beneficial to Democrats is good, and any deemed beneficial to Republicans is bad.

Prominent psychologist Aaron Beck called this process of lumping the world into two categories “polarized thinking.” And because such “lumping” often involves a moral judgment, he argued that this type of distorted thinking has “led to wife-beating, group rape, the Salem witch trials, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Holocaust, and genocide in Cambodia, Turkey, and the Soviet Union."

In the 1960’s, English psychologist Peter Wason coined the term “confirmation bias” after performing a series of experiments on the innate human preference to confirm a hypothesis rather than falsify it. In its essence, confirmation bias means that when presented with a new piece of evidence, humans will interpret it to fit into their previously held beliefs. And when it comes to a this-or-that political system, confirmation bias has drastic effects. It can instigate or perpetuate conflict, from tiffs between diplomats to full-fledged wars.

Psychologist Robert Burton expanded on this in his work, On Being Certain: Thinking You’re Right When You’re Not, going so far as to propose that the feeling of certainty, no matter the context, is the result of involuntary brain functions independent of rational thought. You’re positive you left the keys on the counter? You remember it vividly? Well, the keys are in your coat pocket, and that vivid memory is from the day before last.

When applied to the greater political climate, this phenomena of false convictions, confirmation bias, and in-group favoritism results in a populace that will only believe things that serve their party, interpret all new information to fit their tightly held beliefs and discard the rest, and believe wholeheartedly that they are right and the others are wrong, with no exceptions.

But the situation is not hopeless. Mankind has collectively overcome its baser instincts time and time again across our tumultuous history. And with some cooperation and a significant degree of thoughtfulness, we the people have the potential to overcome “Us-and-Them” politics for good.